that is what is happening to bashar al assad. dramatic high-level defections that show no signs of slowing down while a civil war rages on. more and more it seems people in the regime do not believe the government will win, and so they are abandoning it. assad's chief of military police, his defection enforcer, this week was almost poetic, before defecting his job was to stop other people from defecting. his department was literally tasked with shoring up the loyalty of the armed forces. and he didn't just easily and casually walk out of the country. according to opposition figures, who talked to the "new york times," he planned his escape for weeks and it "ended with a four-hour sprint by motorcycle to the turkish border, driving through woods and on muddy roads." the syrian spokesperson, the one who said publicly that the assad regime would not use chemical weapons on his people, he supposedly left weeks ago, and no one seems to know where he even is. the guardian reports he might be in the united states working with intelligen